Breaking the Chain

I'm going to use a passage of scripture from Matthew chapter 23, if you'd like to find that in your Bibles. I'm going to use verses 29 through 32 this morning, but I'm going to look at part of all of that chapter to begin with, and then I'm also going to look at a passage in the book of Luke, and that passage is Luke 9, 57 through 61. You get a picture of something of Jesus' method of dealing with people, with God's way of dealing with people. You read this story, and you read the Gospels all the way through, you see that what Jesus does constantly is he tells the people the truth. Now, the people who are religious leaders, they question him sometimes when he tells them the truth, because they don't want to hear that. And sometimes when he challenges them with the truth, they find it difficult to accept. They let their anger toward him be known, but Jesus never responds in any way in anger, resentment, or bitterness. And now he's getting to the end of his ministry. He doesn't have much longer with these people, and in this chapter he turns directly to them and challenges them by saying to them something they didn't want to hear. He said to them, you act like you're religious people, but I have to tell you that God's judgment is going to fall on you, and he's going to judge you as if you didn't even belong to him. This was not a welcomed word from these religious leaders, because they considered themselves to be special people. They pointed back to the promise that God made to Abraham, where he said to Abraham, if you will follow me, do what I tell you to do, I will give you this land and it will be yours and your descendants forever. They thought that was eternal security of the Jews, and they believed that no matter what they did, that promise had to be kept because God made an eternal promise. Now Jesus turns to them, the people who are spiritual leaders of the nation, and he says to them, I want to say that you people are just actors. You're just actors because you're not really in the kingdom of God. You're more concerned with what people think of you than what God thinks of you, and you act in every way so that the people around you will look at you and think that you're wonderful and a godly person, but God looks at your heart and he knows differently. You haven't ever entered the kingdom of heaven, so whenever people come to you saying, how can I enter the kingdom of heaven? You tell them what you do, and they become like you, and they never enter either. In fact, you go to great effort to make disciples, win converts. You go everywhere trying to do that, but when you make them, they become followers of yours just like you. Let's pause a moment. That siren's going somewhere. Somebody's in trouble. Let's pray. Father, we don't know the circumstances that call that siren out, but something wrong has happened. We ask that whoever it is and whatever is taking place, that your Holy Spirit would be there. If there's lives involved, we pray that you'd protect them and save them. There's violators of the law. We pray that you would take care of them. We ask you to be with those that go. Make them safe. Amen. Jesus said to them, the Pharisees, these who are religious leaders, the result of all of this is that you're blind people, spiritually blind. You're trying to give spiritual guidance when you yourself don't even have the capacity to do it. In fact, when people come to tell you, should I keep the promises I make, you say, well, you know, we could work this out. If you'll make a promise and you swear on the temple, then you don't have to keep that. But if you swear on the altar, you have to keep it. So be careful. You could work this out so it's to your benefit. Don't you know that God wants you to keep every single promise that he makes? Are you blind to the spiritual realities of God and who he is? And you come to the church and you bring your tithe. You go out and get the mill, the dill seeds. You count out 50 and you bring five and you come up before everybody and you put it on the altar and you think they're going to say, wow, what a great man that guy is. But what happens is you neglect justice and mercy and faithfulness. Don't you realize what's important to God and what really isn't important to him? You see, you're just actors. That's what the word hypocrisy means. It's you're an actor. You want people to look at the outside of you and say, wow, that's a wonderful guy. He's a Bible teacher. He's a great preacher. He's so faithful to the church. But inside, you know that there are things inside of you that God does not like. You want to paint your life so that you're spiritual and holy when you know inside there are sinful, rotten, putrid things. Don't you understand that if you really cleaned up the inside of your life that everyone would look at the outside and they would be proud of that too? Are you so blind that you can't see that God sees inside of you? I don't know if anybody's ever talked to you that way, but no one wants to hear that. They were certainly offended by it. Now, Jesus ends this section with these people in verse 29 saying, I know that you people come from a long line of folks who've done the same thing, but it's time for you to break that chain. Woe you teachers of the law and Pharisees, hypocrites, or actors. You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous and you say, if we'd lived in those days of our forefathers, we would have not taken part with them in the shedding of the blood of the prophets. So you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up then the measure of the sin of your forefathers. And what Jesus is talking about is what happened in the history of Israel. You read back through the Old Testament, you'll see what it was. The people of Israel would come together before God, first at Sinai and then many different other places. And they would say to God, we dedicate our lives to you and we're going to live in obedience to you no matter what. God would say, now what I ask of you is you say, I will do everything you tell me to do no matter what the rest of my life. And they would have wonderful, joyous revivals for all the people. And then the days would go by in weeks and months and years. And pretty soon the people of Israel were drifting away from God, disobedient to him, ignoring his instructions, following other gods, worshiping whoever they wanted, living in however way they wanted to live. Now they thought that God had made this promise to Abraham that I will call you and all your descendants and I will give them this land. So they'd always have that land. They thought God could not ever take it away. But God made that promise to Abraham because Abraham said, I'll follow you. And he did. Wherever God asked him to go, he followed him. God would send a prophet then. Now a prophet was simply a person that spoke the message of God. It's not as mysterious as it might seem to us. All of us in some ways can tell the future. If one of my sons had spilled something on the carpet when mother was gone, I could very well say to them, when your mother gets home, it's not because I can see into the future, it's just that I know my wife very well. And I know that a big spot on the carpet is not something she's going to be pleased with. And I know that whoever caused the spot is going to get a discussion about how to operate inside the house. You all know things about the people that you know very well and you could predict the kind of food they might get, the kind of car they might buy. And if you knew God and his holiness, you could walk up to someone who's living contrary to what God wanted and tell them what God was going to do. And so God found in all of these times, whenever the people of Israel wandered away, he found somebody who knew him. And he asked that person, would you go and tell the people this message? Sometimes they were religious people, sometimes they were even shepherds. You go and this is what I want you to tell them. Because of the way they're living, this is what I'm going to do. And so the prophets would go. But the nation of Israel was a little different than a lot of nations because both the king and the priest were seen to be serving under God's authority. When the king was always placed on the throne, there was a ceremony in which he was installed side of as God's administrator for the civilian or political structure of the nation. And the priest would always make sure that they gave that to him. And the priest then was to give him spiritual direction. But it worked out so that the political leaders and the priest were sort of hand in hand, you know? And as the nation began to drift away, it wasn't just the king. It was the king and the religious people too. All of them began to drift away. The king sort of reflected like the people lived and pretty soon they were living in a way completely contrary to God. The time came one time when they even lost the Bible and no one even knew where it was. The only one they had. That's how far they got from God. And then he would send someone who would come to them and say, God has watched what you're doing. You've left him. You're not obeying his commandments. You're not living in obedience to him. And what he's going to do is send someone in to take over this land. People would say, oh, it's not going to happen. God made a promise to Abraham years ago that this was our land forever. God can't do that. You're violating the scriptures. And they would then attack the ones who came. Isaiah was one of the first ones to come. He had a pretty good ministry with the people of Israel. Not much bad happened to him that we know about in the text of the scripture. But the story is that after his ministry that we have recorded in the Bible, he was sawed in two by one of the kings, Manasseh. Jeremiah was a prophet sent to warn the people of Israel that God was going to take the land and give it to someone else. And when he started, people were upset with him. And they just got more and more upset with him all these years. Forty years he preached this message. People said, oh, he's been saying that 20 years, it's never going to happen. He'd been saying that 30 years, it's never going to happen. He'd been saying that 38 years, it's never going to happen. But in 40 years, it did happen. But that time between when he started and when it really took place, even his brothers came one time and beat him up, said, who do you think you are telling all these bad things about what's going to happen to us? Religious leaders got so mad at him one time, they threw him in a pit, in a cistern, a dry cistern and let him rot down there. He was put in stocks. We don't know what happened to him after the story of his record in the scriptures is given. But outside the scriptures, they say he was taken to Egypt, and there he was stoned to death. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Ezekiel, it's said, was taken to Chaldea, and he was killed in Chaldea. Amos came from the southern kingdoms, and he was just a shepherd and a herdsman. God had given him a message for the northern kingdom, unless you repent and turn around, God is going to destroy this nation. They tortured him and said, get out of this place and don't ever come back. Zechariah is one of the last of the prophets sent, and he was killed. Whenever God sent Elijah, Elijah had warned the king that God was going to withhold rain for this long period of time until he was ready to restore it. And Elijah left. He came back then sometime later, and Obadiah, who's one of the workers for the king, he met him and he said, you remember, whenever you left, they were killing God's prophets, and I found 100 of them and put them in caves, and I've been feeding them all this time. So we know that behind the scenes, prophets were killed by the leaders of Israel. The king and the spiritual leaders killed the spokesman of God. That's what Jesus is referring to. Now, the people in Jesus' day, they didn't do that. They said, we look back on these things in the past and we're ashamed of what our forefathers did. They killed these prophets, they made their life miserable, and we're going to honor them. And so they would build elaborate tombs or places in which they would honor these holy men and righteous men of the past. And they would point to them and say, we love Isaiah, and we love Jeremiah, and we love all of these prophets because they were men of God sent to the nation of Israel. We're so ashamed of what our forefathers did. Now these people have books that we read and say they're the words of God. Jesus said, but you see what you've done? You say, they were our spiritual parents. Their DNA is in you. You admit it yourself. They are our forefathers. Now what was inside of them spiritually is inside of you. You know what Jesus was talking about? John the Baptist came to you with a message from God saying, repent, the kingdom of God is at hand. Acknowledge your sin and turn away from your sin and turn to God with renewed devotion of obedience to him before it's too late. Now many people came to hear John the Baptist and repented and were baptized by him, but none of the spiritual leaders did. The scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees had nothing to do with him. They could have, would have killed him if they could. They didn't, but the leader of their nation Herod did, and they were happy that he did. They didn't issue one single protest at his death. But that was different, you see. This man was saying bad things about them and the people around them. He was saying those people who are up at the temple are not following God and they need to repent and turn their lives over to him. They were criticizing us when we're good, righteous, holy people, not like the people in the past who needed to be corrected. He's doing that to us. And then Jesus came. He started teaching. Over and over again he said to them, the things that you're doing are not what God wants. You're living lives not like he wants you to live. And as they began to hear Jesus, they got more and more angry with Jesus. By the time this story is given to us, they're already beginning to plan to kill him. And he knew that. And they knew it too. But you see, that's an exception. That's not like what it was, you know, with Jeremiah and Isaiah. We are trying to follow God, and we know the law, and we read the law, and we teach the law, and we encourage people to follow the law. They could not see that they were following in the footsteps of their own spiritual forefathers. Blind, Jesus said. Actors, Jesus said. People who are not willing to look at themselves and see that they did not love God with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind. They loved themselves, and they loved the position of honor that they had. They loved everything about what they were doing, and they weren't about to change. No matter what God said, they weren't going to change. Jesus knew that they were exactly the same as the people who'd lived before. This was a long chain of events, and every generation always thought the last generation was so wrong and so bad, but they were simply doing it right. Jesus ends up by saying, well, I've told you all I can tell you. Just go ahead and sin all you want to, you're going to anyway. It's like, you know, you've kind of been watching your weight a little, you know, through the fall season, and then Thanksgiving comes, and there's the pumpkin pie and the pecan pie, and you try to be careful and eat, you know, and then you realize, I've really gone off my diet. And you say, oh, what the heck, I'm just going to eat the pie anyway. I've already gone over the limit. That's what he's saying. You got up to the edge, you pushed it. Every prophet that God sent, you've done that, and now I'm here. Go ahead, go the whole way. Jesus told a parable about them, that there's a man who had a vineyard one time, and he fixed it so everything was working well, and then he leased it out to some people to run it, like the nation of Israel or the temple. When time came for his prophets, he sent his servants back, and he said, give me the prophets that are due to me. And the people that were there said, this is ours, who's he asking for it? And so they scolded those people that came and beat them up and sent them back. And so the owner of the property sent somebody else and demanded that his prophets be given to him, and they said, he's a long way away, he can't do anything, let's just kill him. We don't want to do that. So they killed him. The man said, you know what, I'll send my only son. And when the only son comes, they'll say, wow, he's serious about this, we better pay. But he sent his son, and they said, hey, if we can get rid of this guy, then we've got the whole thing to ourselves. And they killed the son. That's what was going to happen. Jesus was giving them permission. You don't want to obey God, you want to do what you want to do. Why don't you just go ahead and stick the knife in me, if that's what you're intent on doing. That's a hard story, isn't it? You know, the hardest part is it's about us, religious people. And Jesus didn't mean that all the Pharisees were this way, but he meant some of them were. He didn't mean that all the people who were in the temple were like this, but he meant some of them were. Religious leaders, you see, this is our biggest problem. Over and over again through the years, religious people have faced this same issue. You know why? It is very difficult to live a holy life. It's costly, it's demanding, and you know what? We don't like to do things that are hard. We don't like anybody to demand that we do things we don't want to do, or don't like to do, or they're not comfortable for us. The basic part of our human nature is we want to do exactly what we want to do, that we enjoy doing. That's pleasurable. Unless we don't mind a little bit of something, you know, but man, when it gets to where it's costing us, that's where we draw the line. That's just our human nature. And to cross over that line, to do something that's really costly, you have to have great determination and great passion. You have to love that, whatever it is you're doing, with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. And that's where God says, you must love me with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. And then if you do, you will do what I tell you to do. And that's where it gets hard. It's not hard sometimes to do it, or even start out to do it, but you know, it's hard to keep doing that all of your life because there's so many temptations that come to you. And so many people around you that say, I'm serving God and I don't have to do all that. And you say, well, if that's right, I don't, no reason for me to have to, you know, do all that hard stuff. I'm with these over here that don't do that. It's what happened in the Bible. It's what happens to us. You make a great passionate commitment to God. I'm going to be in church. I'm going to read the Bible. I'm going to pray. I'm going to witness. And you look around and not everybody's doing that. And I made the prayer just like they did, and I was baptized in the water just like they are. And they say they're going to heaven, so I must be going to heaven too. So I'll just coast along with them. That's what causes churches to die, what causes the kingdom to wither in the hearts and minds of people. See, it's really about us too. It's about realizing that God didn't stop at any point in history and say, now the rest of you can coast. The story is told in Luke chapter 9 about Jesus. Jesus is walking along and Luke sort of compresses two or three stories that are found in other places. And a man came up to Jesus and said, I'll follow you wherever you go. I mean, that's really a strong commitment. Jesus said, I want you to understand what you're saying. Foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place even to lay his head. If you come and follow me, you may be the kind of person that has no home to go to. Do you mean this? It is true that sometimes God asks people to follow him and it means it costs them their home and their job and the comfort of where they always have lived. Another man, Jesus said to him, to another man, follow me. But the man replied, first Lord, let me go bury my father. Jesus said, let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God. Now this man, Jesus had given him a specific command. I want you to come and follow me. The man said, Jesus, I will do that. No doubt about it, but you know what? I have one thing I need to get done first. And if I can get that done first, then I'll go do what you want. Now who's in control of that man's situation? Jesus, who told him, this is what I want you to do, or the man who said, you have a good idea and I'll do that as soon as I get done what I want to do. And it wasn't something really evil that he wanted to do. He wanted to go back and bury his father. We don't know if the man was near death or dead already, and it was the obligation of the oldest son to do that. Jesus was saying to him, I want you to ignore your earthly obligations to your human parents and listen to me. When I tell you to do something, you set all of your family aside and you follow me. It's getting harder, isn't it? What if God told you to leave your family and go be a missionary? I heard a missionary tell a story one time about World War II, and he and his wife were called to Africa. They had two small children and they knew God called them to be missionaries to Africa. In the African waters, North Africa and Atlantic waters, the German U-boats were running and it was dangerous. And so they didn't want to take the kids, they rode on a train to Kansas City, left those two small children with their parents, who are now the grandparents of these kids, got on a boat to be gone five years, or maybe dead. Come and follow me. What kind of devotion does someone have to do that? Someone who loves God with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind. Now, I didn't ask everybody to do that, but the man that told the story said he did. He knew he asked us to do it. God still today asks that of people. He told another, he said, I will follow your, but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family. I just want to tell them what I'm going to do and have sort of a farewell, you know, way for them to break it easy for them. Jesus replied, no one who puts his hand to the plow looks back as fit for service in the kingdom of God. Wow, it's hard, isn't it? I can't even go back to my family and tell them goodbye. No, because when I give you an assignment, I want you to do it. Do you trust me, or do you trust your own judgment above mine? Are you smarter than I am? Do you know more than I know? But Jesus never asked this of everybody, you understand that? To every one of us, it's a different kind of call, but there was a man who came to Jesus and he said, I want to follow you. I hear this about the kingdom of God and I want this spiritual life so bad, I really want it. Jesus said, well, you know about the commandments, you should keep those. Oh, he said, I'm a religious man, I keep those, I've been keeping those since I was a little kid, but there's still something inside my heart that's missing. I don't have the spiritual thing that you have, and I really want that. Jesus knew what it was. We don't know how he knew what it was, but he knew that the man really loved his stuff. Now, I don't know when you read that story if you think, well, this must have been someone like Bill Gates, you know? Certainly not me, I'm not rich, you know, being wealthy is a matter of condition and circumstances. Most of the people in Jesus' day, they had one set of clothes, they were maybe upper or lower class, they had two sets, middle class, three sets, anybody here have less than three sets? Not a person in this room is not more wealthy in their number of assets than the man that came to Jesus that day, not a one of us. He said, what it is, you see, is you love your money and your possessions and your wealth more than you love God. I'll show you the test here. You can follow me, but I want you to take everything you have and sell it and come and follow me. The man thought that over and left. There are people that God asked to do this. When I was in seminary, I met doctors that had left a wealthy practice to come and train to be missionaries overseas, I met CEOs of corporations and executives in corporations that had turned their life, their back on their former life and now were studying to be pastors and would finish and go out and pastor a small church somewhere after they'd been executives in great big organizations because God said, come and do my work. Jesus warned us, if any of you want to follow me, you must deny yourself, take up your cross and then obey me, and then God doesn't ask everybody to do what he did with the rich ruler. Do you know what he did say to everybody? I want you to go into this world and make disciples. I want you to find people who are not in the kingdom, make friends with them, share your faith with them, lead them to place their life in the hands of God, and I want you to teach them how to live. Every single person has that command. Will it be hard? Yes. Will people love you for it? Not all the time. Will you enjoy it? On rare occasions. It's just hard work for God. Well, but I've made my commitment to Christ and I've been baptized in the water and I've joined the church and I'm okay. I don't have to do all that stuff. Well, that's exactly what the Pharisees said to Jesus. I don't have to do all that. God made a promise. I'm secure. I'm born again and have eternal security. So what if I don't do that? God's not going to take that away from me. Well, maybe you never have it if that's your attitude. Be warned, God does not have a game going. It was an issue worth the life of his own son. And so we stand to read this passage saying, you know, I wish I'd have been back in Jesus' day. It would have been great to sit there and watch him multiply all that bread and feed all those people and walk on the water and, oh man, it had been so wonderful. Well, if you're not willing to do this stuff, you wouldn't have been willing to do the stuff he was asking the people around him then because he was asking the same things, see. What God expects is for you to love him with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And then you can enter the kingdom of heaven. And when you die, you'll go there. If that's not what's inside of you, that's not where you're headed. That's what Jesus was telling these people. They didn't like him. They said, this can't be true. I'm a good person. I know the Bible. You see, religious people don't always make good followers of Jesus because they look on the inside and they try to please themselves, not God. What Jesus said is, go ahead and do your thing, do whatever you think is right, but when the last day comes, you will know whether you enter the kingdom of heaven or not. I want to suggest to you, you don't want to wait until then because then you don't have a chance. Now is the time for you to decide, am I prepared to love God more than anything in all the world? No matter what my friends think, what my family thinks, no matter how hard it is, no matter how humiliating it is, no matter how embarrassing it is, I will do as best I can what God wants. That's what a follower of Jesus does. Could you bow your heads for a moment? Could you look God straight in the face and say, I am doing everything you want me to do, the way you want me to do it. None of us really can, but let me ask if it's your intention. Are you satisfied not to, or are you hungry to be more like God? That's the question. See, that's the difference between being a fan of God and a cheerleader for God and loving him with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And you say to God right now, Lord, I will do anything in this world that you tell me. No restrictions. I want to ask you if you have the names of people you're praying for to come into the kingdom. If you're trying to make, build relationships with them, if your intent is in this lifetime to make someone, help someone become a disciple of Jesus Christ, or are you just ignoring everybody and enjoying your own life? That's the difference between a disciple and one of the Pharisees is obedience to him. So Lord Jesus, how hard it is to hear your words to us, because you demand far more of us than we demand of ourselves. But we know without following you, there is no way to enter the kingdom of heaven. You're the narrow gate. We must listen and follow you. I ask for myself to search my heart and mind. I know there's some things about me you want differently. I want them to help me to pay the price to be obedient. I ask for every person here that you would tell each of us exactly what it is you want from us, that we might find in this world life in all of its fullness and in the next life forever. In Jesus' name we ask it. I want to ask in this time of invitation to invite you to respond to God. What do you know he wants from you? If you were to come and stand here as he is by means of his Holy Spirit, has he said to you, you know, you're one of those fakers. You're one of those that just does what you think are the minimum things. There are many things I've asked you to do you refuse to do because you don't want to. It's too hard. It's not convenient. It's costly. And what I'm asking of you is to be obedient. If you've heard God in any way like that, what I want to invite you to do is to say to him, I'm sorry. I want you to take my life and make me what you want me to be. Now you know what he wants you to do. You've never confessed him as your Lord and Savior, you need to do that. If you're not living in obedience to him, even though you've confessed that, you need to change your pattern, read the Bible, pray, be in church, do the work that God's given you to do. If you're not trying to help make disciples, promise him you're going to look for people to whom you can be a witness and a guide. You don't have to come forward to make a promise to God. It's between you and him, but you know what he wants you to do. In this time as we sing, God's going to talk to you. I'll be at the front. There'll be others here. If you want to come and share a promise you want to make, sometimes it helps us to keep a promise to make it openly and publicly. Whatever God asks you to do, this is the time he asks you. Is this going to be another time in which you say, well, I know what you want me to do, but I don't want to do that? Well, you have to decide. Would you stand please? As God talks to you, do what he asks. He bears them all and frees us from the accursed load. I bring my guilt to Jesus to wash my crimson stains. Wipe in his blood most precious till not a stain remains. I lay my wants on Jesus. All fullness dwells in him. He heals all my diseases. He doth my soul redeem. I lay my griefs on Jesus. My burdens and my cares he from them all releases. He all my sorrows shares. I long to be like Jesus, strong, loving, lowly, mild. I long to be like Jesus, the Father's holy child. I long to be with Jesus, amid the heavenly throng, to sing with saints His praises, to learn the angel songs. This evening in our service, we're studying the book of Romans. And in Romans chapter 5, Paul talks about some of the most critical issues in the Christian life. Here's a passage where we understand why people baptize babies. There's a passage in which he talks about why some people believe that folks from the day they're born are destined or predetermined to go to hell. This is the passage of scripture which many doctrines that are maybe different than what you might believe are discussed. And you'll see why people believe them. So at six o'clock, we meet for a time of fellowship and prayer and opening the scriptures. If God wants you there, you come. So Lord, we look back on these great men of old, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea, John the Baptist, yourself. You weren't able to live in the times in which they lived, but we live now when you live. And we know you're doing the same thing as you did those days, calling people to love you with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind. I ask for every person that's made a promise to you here today, that you'd give the wisdom, determination, and strength to keep that promise to you. And I pray, Father, that we might not be in your eyes, the blind, arrogant Pharisees, but instead your loving children. In Jesus' name, we ask this. Amen. Every promise we can make, every prayer and step of faith, every difference we will make is only by His grace. Every mountain we will climb, every ray of hope we shine, every blessing left behind is only by His grace. Grace alone which God supplies, strength unknown He will provide. Christ in us, our cornerstone, we will go forth in grace alone.